The present disclosure relates to social networks and electronic communication. In particular, the present disclosure relates to a system and methods for associating a “loudness,” relevance or importance to electronic communications in social networks. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to a system and method for self-regulating social news feeds.
Spam e-mail (known also as junk e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail) is generally identical e-mail messages sent to numerous recipients who did not request it. The phrase spam has also been applied to other communications such as those in social networks such as instant messages or posts. Spam used to be generated primarily and most often by unknown third-parties trying to sell you something. In recent years, however, spam has increasingly been generated by your own friends, and to some extent, possibly by yourself. The advent of social news feeds embedded in online social networks has made it clear that, if given an unlimited amount of bandwidth to express themselves, a loud minority of users will abuse that freedom and post excessively/frequently on these shared spaces, sharing random fleeting thoughts of little significance, making it time-consuming for everyone else to filter their way to more worthwhile messages. Even among users who think more carefully before posting, not all their messages are of equal importance.
The prior art has attempted to address this problem, but existing solutions to minimize exposure to low-quality messages are often too extreme and/or impractical. For example, several impractical solutions are avoiding the social network in question, removing the loud user from the list of contacts or silencing the loud user. However, even loud users have interesting things to say once in awhile, and even deliberate users sometimes say trivial things. Thus, targeting individual users instead of individual messages fails to solve the problem.
Existing solutions are typically aimed at maximizing exposure of high-quality messages and usually rely exclusively on the volume of response from the audience. While this is often helpful, many important messages that are not immediately caught into a self-perpetuating cycle of public approval end up getting quickly buried along with all the junk messages.